As good of a year as 2009 was it had its fair share of stinkers. There were a lot of movies out that looked terrible but that I didn’t see, like Bride Wars or Confessions of a Shopaholic, but there were plenty I did for reasons I can’t really explain. Some were movies I thought would be good and others were movies I knew would be bad. I am a fan of train wrecks so I have a particular fondness for fun bad movies. In the case of all of these on the list, they were not fun-bad they were just really bad.

10. X-Men Origins: Wolverine

This one really hurt. I loved the first two X-Men movies and have been chomping at the bit to see Gambit show up in the films. Then you had Deadpool and I was sold. I got to the theater and it all just went to shit. When I really knew I was fucked was when Wolverine looks at his newly metal covered claws for the first time and they looked like something out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. To be fair, there were things I liked a lot about Wolverine and its inclusion on this list has more to do with how disappointing it turned out to be than with it being offensively awful. I can just imagine how cool it COULD have been and I get a bit depressed. Hopefully they do better next time and hopefully the Deadpool movie will actually feature Deadpool.

9. Taking of Pelham 123

This is another one that is not necessarily terrible but was disappointing based on the potential. You have Denzel Washington doing his thing and all kinds of Tony Scott editing and a script that is occasionally good on the one hand and on the other you have a story that doesn’t explore its themes very well and ultimately feels hollow, whole portions of the script that are absolutely awful and then you have whatever the hell John Travolta thinks he is doing these days on the other. I understand the dude has been through some hard times but every choice the man makes professionally lately leaves me completely baffled. His performance in this is very difficult to watch with a straight face and it really lowers the effectiveness of everyone else. The biggest problem with this movie, though, is that at the end I just really didn’t give a shit what happened to anyone at all. It seemed like there may have been a good movie in there somewhere, at least on the script level, with a few more polishes and fewer bat shit crazy acting choices but as it is, the Taking of Pelham 123 is just a forgettable mess.

8. Fast &Furious

I liked the first movie THE Fast and THE Furious more than I would care to admit. I don’t really know why. I am not particularly into cars or Paul Walker’s abs but there was a charm to that movie that led me to buy the DVD and watch it more than I am comfortable talking about in public. The second one suffered from Vin Diesel making XXX instead and I didn’t bother with the third. This new installment excited me because I hoped with the original cast back together some of that magic might also be back. As it turns out, it was just the sort of jumbled mess you get when you write a script just so the original cast can be back. The plot had potential on paper and was completely bungled. Not even the racing could save it as it was fairly weak and unexciting.  It also irritates me that they couldn’t bother to give the thing a real title rather than just omitting the word ‘the’ twice and throwing in a ‘&’ but what I really missed out on is a scene in which the FBI or whatever law enforcement agency Walker’s O’Conner has wormed his way into straight takes him out back and beats him with a rubber hose both for egregious law violations and being such a monumental failure. I think they owe us that. I am not into torture porn but I could be happy with 90 minutes of just that. Also this movie really makes me wish that Vin Diesel would go back to films like Pitch Black, Boiler Room and the Knockaround Guys instead of wasting his time with all of the complete bullshit he has been in the past few years. Dude was the fucking Iron Giant for godsakes.

7. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

This movie was so bad I almost remember nothing about it. I can’t imagine what keeps good actors coming to this garbage but I imagine it must have something to do with illicit pictures or a coke habit. I would much rather believe that Bill Nighy has some kind of barnyard fetish than actually thinks these scripts are good. It really boggles my mind as well that Michael Sheen can be in two terrible genre pictures and then still manage to be awesome in other things. I wish he would make up his mind so I could settle into loving or hating him. At this point he just baffles me. It makes me sad to see Rhona Mitra here too as she seems to have settled into a life of terrible b-movie turns when she is far too talented for that. She’s also hotter than Kate Beckinsale.

6. Street Fighter: Legend of Chun Li

I have a long standing love affair with the Street Fighter game series. When I say love affair I mean an obsession that has threatened more than one relationship. I wanted to like this movie. I wanted it to be leagues better than the abysmal Street Fighter movie of the 90’s.  I wanted to see goddamn Ryu. I was disappointed on all counts. I really don’t get why it is so hard to make a good Street Fighter movie. They did it with Mortal Kombat. They did it with DOA in so far as the movie was exactly as patently ridiculous and exploitative as the game. Why can’t they pull it off with Street Fighter? As far as Legend of Chun Li is concerned, I think Chris Klein has a whole lot to do with it. Also a terrible script and poor direction coupled with awful misuse of characters. Seriously when you have a character as cool as Vega how are you going to cast Taboo from the Black Eyed Peas? There are some actual martial artists who could have taken the role. Honestly the rest of the cast does the best they can with what they’ve been handed but there is only so much you can do when what you are handed is a steaming pile of dogshit. Comparing the two movies, I prefer the 1994 version for the following reasons: it is so bad it is hilarious, Raul Julia is intentionally funny, Jean-Claude Van Damme is unintentionally funny, and it had Ryu.

5. Pink Panther 2

I love Steve Martin. I love the Pink Panther movies. I liked the first Steve Martin Pink Panther movie. I hate this one a lot. Before I saw it, I wondered why Kevin Kline declined to return as Dreyfus and now I imagine it was just because he read the script. This movie is a mess and the only laughs it offers up are from a scene recycled from the first one (Clouseau’s complete inability to say ‘hamburger’). Useless and completely forgettable, I had to look it up on IMDB to remember what the plot was. It wasn’t worth it.

4. Haunting In Connecticut

Readers of this site may or may not know that I am a paranormal investigator with published books on the topic and as such have a certain level of authority when it comes to the subject. I have also been aware of the story detailed in the Haunting in Connecticut for awhile now and have had occasion to hear directly from at least one person involved. So with that said I can say with absolute confidence that the movie is nothing more than unmitigated bullshit. The story was made popular by the documentary/re-enactment program A Haunting on cable and if you accept that account as fact, which I certainly do not, then you will find yourself scratching your head at what you find on screen in the movie. Honestly, the story is creepy enough with its ridiculous embellishments on the TV show without any of the added nonsense. The effects are bad, the acting, with the exception of the kid that played Beaver on Veronica Mars, is bad and the whole thing reeks of fail. I am really tired of seeing shit like this carrying the ‘based on a true story’ tag when really it should read ‘based on some shit that just came directly out of my ass.’

3. Year One

This one really threw me for a loop. I love Harold Ramis. I love Jack Black. I sort of like Michael Cera (his attitude regarding the Arrested Development movie has really dropped his stock for me). I really hated Year One. The concept was really cool and had a lot of potential for great comedy but what it ended up delivering was a mess of a road movie with one unfunny vignette after another. There are some cameos that would have ended up cool if any of the actors could have done something vaguely funny with the material but instead just fell flat. There could have been some really biting religious satire here but what we were handed was just toothless nonsense. Such a waste of good potential and talent.

2. New Moon

I know that the title is supposed to have the Twilight branding but I refuse to include it because I think it is really stupid. Kind of like the movie itself. It should be clear by now that I really hate this series and the second movie is no exception. I will say for it that New Moon is significantly better than Twilight just as I felt the second book was superior to the first. The movie is in turn better than the book because the movie cannot use improper grammar nor misspell things. It still suffers from the same massive problems the book does most notably building up a story and relationship for 3/4ths of its length only to abandon it for something much less interesting and at least 60% more ridiculous. I really don’t get why people think the Bella/Edward relationship is so beautiful and worthwhile. He is a passive-aggressive emo abuse merchant and she is never happy no matter what happens. She mopes her way through the first one wanting to be with Edward, then she mopes her way through the opening of New Moon all depressed because she is aging, then mopes her way through her relationship with Jacob because he isn’t Edward and then mopes her way through getting Edward back because she’s still human and he had the gall to ask her to marry him. I can’t wait to see her mope through Eclipse because she’s worried that he will die fighting Victoria and because he is a shit head who won’t let her see her best friend, and then in Breaking Dawn when she mopes through getting married and all that other spoilery shit that goes on in that ridiculous book. Anyway, even with its improvement over the last movie, New Moon is still laughably bad but sadly not so bad that it is fun. The only good that will come of this is that eventually we will get a kick ass Rifftrax track.

1. The Fourth Kind

This movie is a real mystery to me. I am not sure what they thought they were doing here. The movie tries to float that the events in the film are true and that every interview you see is backed by real footage. You find this out when Milla Jovovich comes out in the beginning and announces who she is, who she will be playing and how it is all real. What follows, then is essentially a re-enactment show like you are watching Unsolved Mysteries in which the re-enactment segments are more competently acted than the supposed real footage. I think that is the biggest problem here. In order to buy into the conceit that this is real it would be helpful if the acting and effects in the ‘real’ footage could pass even the most baseline of scrutiny. The director throws up some 24 like screens in which you see the ‘real’ footage next to the re-enactments and the disparity in quality is absolutely staggering. The effects, also, are embarrassing as we are treated to a supposed real levitation that looks like it would be at home at a high school magic show. On top of that, the late in the game plot twist is ineffective because characters who knew about it before hand never said anything at all which further betrays this as nonsense. I don’t really understand what the point is of going to all the trouble in the movie to convince the audience that it is real when you haven’t done even the most cursory of viral marketing or ass covering. You look it up online and you will find only a half-assed attempt at publishing documents from the film’s protagonist and that is it. I would think if you were really trying to fool people then you would go to the lengths necessary to not be completely foiled by a google search. Pretty much everything is half assed here though so I am not terribly surprised. I have to mention that the great Elias Koteas is in two movies on this list and that makes me sad. The once and mighty Casey Jones really needs to get a new agent.